the man
I knew this man skin like worn leather lived in a ravine by the high school, sleeping underneath the yellow of a patchwork quilt smelling like nicotine and filth. I met him when I was 15 he'd hang around my high school pan handling with a Campbell's soup can. When one day he sat right next to me and said "If no one remembers me after I am dead, would I ever even have existed?" We use to sit there on that concrete ledge near the chain link fences and contemplate all the philosophical truths, my parents had tried so hard to shield from me. But the man for all his knowledge, I realized, was seeking after what all humans seek after. Immortality. The man who lived in a ravine was able to accept the awaiting embrace of death but he could not accept the idea that once gone, he would be forgotten. The man who had introduced me to all the truth seekers had never himself been introduced to God.